Mercifully for a Fed seen by some as willfully blind to a nascent, if not especially acute, inflation re-heat, housing disinflation in the US, long the missing piece of the puzzle, might’ve finally arrived.

OER, the key component of the BLS’s shelter measure, registered its softest reading in nearly three years, according to Wednesday’s US CPI release. The rent of primary residence gauge was benign as well.

More precisely, the 0.23% OER reading was the slowest monthly increase since January of 2021, and the rent gauge, at 0.21%, the softest since July of the same year.

The overall shelter gauge posted a warmer, but still tolerable, 0.3% advance. (The “lodging away from home” measure notched its biggest monthly increase in over two years.)

That’s the good news. There was not-so-good news too. The Fed can’t count on help from the goods side anymore. Indeed, core goods prices rose 0.3% in November. The new cars category logged its largest monthly advance since October of 2022, and used vehicle prices rose 2% in November from October, the second consecutive outsized jump. If you don’t count cars, core goods prices barely rose, though.

Wednesday’s release showed grocery prices increased pretty sharply, not a surprise, but not welcome either. The 0.5% MoM gain on the food at home gauge was the warmest since January of 2023, and the overall food gauge posted its second-biggest 12-month gain of 2024.

The unrounded core print was 0.30808%, the second warmest since the Q1 re-heat scare. The YoY figure’s loitering well north of 3%, and the monthly pace suggests that’s where it’ll stay.

As the chart text notes, the Fed’s almost surely going to cut anyway. Next week, and then probably two more times at least looking out to June of 2025.

The Committee’s convinced they have a soft landing on their hands and they don’t want to risk it. They’re also convinced, by and large, that the neutral rate’s considerably lower than current policy settings, despite having very little (if any) concrete evidence to support that contention.

There’s little use in parsing various CPI accounts from analysts, economists and sundry “experts.” Perusing those on Wednesday was a torturous experience. If you didn’t know any better, you’d be inclined to ask if everyone’s looking at the same data given glaring interpretational disparities. Ask one person, and disinflation momentum’s intact. Ask somebody else, and the progress has stalled entirely.

The (quasi-tragic) irony’s always the same: Exactly no one analyzing these numbers professionally has to worry about inflation, because Wall Street economists — to say nothing of the bloviating PMs and “brand names” who weigh in on business television and social media to satisfy their own vanity — make so much money that inflation would have to be 30% at least to have an impact on their own economic behavior and purchasing decisions. The same goes for Fed officials.

Being poor — i.e., being intimately familiar with the corrosive effects of inflation — obviously doesn’t qualify you to set monetary policy (I’m reminded of the cartoon in The New Yorker where a guy on a plane polls his fellow passengers on whether he should be allowed to fly the aircraft because the pilots have “lost touch” with everyday people), but at the same time, the results of last month’s election were another reminder that Main Street’s wise to the distinct possibility that the “serious” people don’t know what the f-ck is going on.